As well as using toy photography as an outlet to make sense of or escape the world, or as a means to unify in a divided world, maybe there’s also a place for toy photography to question the world?Continue reading Don’t Rock the Toy Boat!

Eight Moderators signed up, each being allocated another to find a $20US gift to add to their toy photography arsenal.

Buying a toy for a toy photographer. Easy, right? Not necessarily.

This seemingly simple gift exchange has morphed into an exercise in investigation. Trawling though feeds to gauge an interest. Scanning photos for prospective gifts that might me absent from their extensive collection. Examining posts for a gift that is likely to complement an existing assembly, or send the recipient off in a new direction in their toy photography.

Xmas has been X’d
No colored lights, no shopping sprees
No more presents under dead treesNOFX – Xmas Has Been X’ed

I wrote about why I wouldn’t manipulate my photos beyond the simple edit before. I wrote about how the perfectionist in me would still see me in front of my computer hours later if I embarked down this road.

However, I’ve established a middle ground. And this medium is thanks to my old friend, time.

I’ve set the stopwatch. I’ve set a self-imposed constraint of 20-minutes for photo manipulations. Once the countdown stops at zero, Photoshop stops too!

Setting a limit puts a stop to the procrastination, the over finessing, and wasting away hours at the computer. Who’s got the time to spend hours and hours editing one photo? Not me!

At the start of this year I made a resolution. So what did I want from the year? A pebble in my shoe!

I wanted a pebble in my shoe to keep me shifting, keep me squirming, and keep me uncomfortable. I hoped that this would keep me shifting until I found my style, or until I became comfortable enough to realise my style would never be constant and it’d always need to be changing; just like my stance with a pebble in my shoe.

I don’t want a career, I got enough to deal with hereScreeching Weasel – Ashtray

I love numbers

Did you know 2 and 5 are the only prime numbers that end with a 2 or a 5?

And did you know, 40 when written “forty” is the only number with letters in alphabetical order, while “one” is the only one with letters in reverse order when written in English? And “four” is the only number in the English language that is spelt with the same number of letters as the number itself?Continue reading Numbers Slumber

When is a photo a faux tow? Is photo editing a false pull; drawing people to an artificial interpretation of reality? Or, is reality already blurred when we’re taking photos of toys?

I used to try to capture all I could in camera. Sure, I’d tweak and enhance what was captured, but I steered clear of opening Photoshop to add anything. If I did open Photoshop, it was to take away dust, dirt and imperfections. My reasoning for avoiding Photoshop was I didn’t want to unleash the perfectionist in me.Continue reading Photo or Faux Tow

Things have been pretty heavy on the blog of late. There have been some meaty subjects to sink our teeth into, which is cool. But, as I vegetarian, I thought it time to step away from all this meaty content, and get back to my roots. Fun.

Essentially Entertaining

I started posting LEGO photos back in 2012, with simple photos accompanied by silly captions and puns. Scouring the interwebs for puns was the source of inspiration for my photos. If a pun made me giggle, I’d then create a LEGO version of it.

“Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one.”– Dr. Seuss

This was back in my early days on Instagram. It was before Instagram was flooded with users hell-bent on chasing numbers and fixated on follower counts. I think most of my early photos ended up in the feeds of 100 followers. But that was cool, I wasn’t doing it for numbers; I was doing it for fun.Continue reading Fundamentally Fun

I don’t just write posts. I also read them. And then I write about reading them. Today I put some of Shelly’s tips into practice. And wrote about it!

Beating Baader-Meinhof to the punch!

I’ve written about Baader-Meinhof before, the term coined to describe a concept or a thing you just found out about, suddenly popping up everywhere. When I did, it was about a photo I took that I noticed a lot of Shelly’s “the basics” contained in it when I was editing.

So, before I weirded myself out by discovering Shelly’s tips jumping out at me from my photos again, I decided to take some of her recent tips and purposely go out and put them into practice. Take that Baader-Meinhof!Continue reading Taking on Tips